At last, a piece worth reading about sustainability. Gillian Darley's
re-definition of the term as
durability opens up a far more
interesting forum than the myopic focus on carbon reduction that has
smothered the industry. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for building
efficiency, but the idea that low-carbon housing is in itself an architectural
ideology scares me witless. The Passivhaus debate is relevant here:
super-sealed buildings don't sit well with flexibility (think of Stewart
Brand's 'shear layers' in
how buildings learn); but more
importantly why are they so often located in suburban contexts, reliant on the
car? do their owners eat beef, own mobile phones and fly abroad on holiday? and
why are the buildings always so ugly? Sustainability in Architecture asks all
these questions, but we are currently answering none of them. Sadly, I
fear that Gillian's definition of sustainability will be ignored. Carbon
reduction is a convenient area of sustainability as a marketing tool for
products. You won't see many stands on the issues Gillian is talking
about at Ecobuild, but you will see a plethora of ordinary building products,
marketed as being sustainable. Sustainability cannot exist in isolation:
there is quite simply no such thing as a sustainable product, building or city;
only a more or less sustainable society.
